Topic: Chemistry or chemical engineering? (Read 464 times)

I have started to really enjoy chemistry, particularly electrochemistry and associated technologies such as batteries and fuel cells. What degree would be best to study and potentially learn to build these technologies, chemistry or chemical engineering?

It seems that both degrees could lead to a career in these fields based on my research, but which would set me up for a career perhaps innovating in these areas?

Roughly speaking, as a chemist you would be able to develop the theoretical and experimental basis of these concepts, but as a chemical engineer you would be able to scale it up to industry level and make it feasible on a large scale.

You can make some interesting things in a laboratory that may never see the light of day because they are either too expensive for industry purposes or the starting materials/chemicals are so polluting that they cannot be passed due to environmental regulations/political reasons. However, it is also the job of the engineer to solve these problems and potentially make it feasible.

That said, none of this is mutually exclusive and I think exactly those areas of chemistry can be explored both through pure chemistry and chemical engineering.

Don't specialize too much. Presently you like electrochemistry, OK. In the future, you don't know.

Also, technologies have a time for development, a time for sales, a time for obsolescence. CR-roms or hard disk drives don't hire researchers any more. Batteries have been around for a long time, but that's no proof for their future. Maybe at some point all research will have been done, just like we've discovered all continents, all planets around our Sun, possibly all particles. Or a completely different technology will replace batteries. Or all companies will have relocated to a place where you don't want to live, just like microelectronics vanished from Europe.